the Arab problem

Throughout Israel, Arabs engage in petty offenses against Jews: they push elbows in buses, disturb the peace in public places, and insult Jewish women. Typically, the police intervene only when the Jews push back. It is not that police guard Arab offenders against Jewish vigilantes: rather, police tend to respond to significant disturbances while ignoring minor squabbles.

Such a policy is sensible in a normal homogenous state, where petty offenses happen at random and one can usually avoid them by moving to a more affluent neighborhood. But I also remember a scene on a stretch of road connecting West and East Palo Alto, which are, respectively, one of the most affluent places in the United States and its rundown counterpart, populated by blacks and Hispanics. Every time a car from the East ventured into the West, it was followed openly and closely by a police car. The Israeli situation is different: Arabs live in Jewish districts and cannot be easily controlled even if the leftist establishment were to abandon its racial blank-slate policies. In many areas, the Jewish population is defenseless against the Arabs: the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Tzfat and the old Jews of Akko cannot resist the Arabs.

Nor there is a legal basis for prosecuting the Arabs. Even if the police use street-camera recordings, merely speaking offensively to a Jewish woman wouldn’t merit prosecution in a country which turns a blind eye to Arab rock-throwers.

The problem arises because the events are viewed on a micro-level, as individual petty offenses rather than a coordinated wave of Arab offense against Jews. Large wars are not made up mostly of battles; for the most part, they consist of marching and waiting in trenches. Yet no one imagines that a marching army is inoffensive. Consider muggers in the United States: they are black, white, and asian. They have no political agenda, and they cease to be muggers once they get a satisfying job. Not so with Arab muggers in Israel. They share political goals and hatreds, and they belong to a distinct community. As we can see in shopping malls and hospitals, even well-off Arabs are still prone to anti-Jewish behavior. And we cannot subsidize all the Israeli Arabs—a quarter, soon to become a third of our population—into affluence.

Most importantly, the absence of Jewish resistance provokes Arab muggers. Police indifference looks to them like government complacency, not too dissimilar from the Arab cries during the 1929 Hebron massacre, “Government is with us!”

What should the proper response be? Certainly not to shout indecencies at Arab women, as happens sometimes in places like Hebron. Instead, recognize that we are dealing with one major crime rather than myriad instances of mugging. The crime in question is the Arab assault on the Jewish state. The assault is implicitly coordinated by the mutual political interest of Arabs in doing away with Jewish dominance in Israel. Arab muggers engage in the high crime of treason.

Realistically, we cannot hope to prosecute for treason every Arab who shouts indecencies at a Jewish woman. Nor can we pinpoint every Arab who deliberately pushes Jewish passengers on a bus. So long as the number of Arabs in Jewish districts is relatively small, a simple solution would be for police to turn a blind eye to Jewish vigilantes who punish the Arab muggers. In the long term, the only solution is to expel the Arabs.